Sunday, March 18, 2018

Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer on censorship (music video)

March 17, 2018 - "Katie of ... WSOU radio station recently conducted an interview with Iced Earh leader and guitarist Jon Schaffer. In that interview, he expressed his thoughts on his lyrics censored in order to get them played on certain radio stations:

"I'm not a fan of censorship at all, because I'm very much a First Amendment guy. And I think it's weird that that would even be a topic in America; I don't think it should be....

"We've played in China ... I guess it was on the 'Dystopia' world tour; we did Shanghai and Beijing — and before the government would issue our visas to get into the country, they had to look at the lyrics of the setlist that we were gonna perform. And ... the only thing that was remotely against authoritarianism in that setlist was the song ' V', and we were wondering if that was gonna actually cause us to have a problem. But we put it in there and they were okay with that one. I mean, it isn't blatantly saying, 'Rise up and overthrow your tyrannical government,'" but it is kind of saying that. [Laughs]

"'I'm not a fan of censorship. I'm a freedom guy. I'm very much a libertarian type. I'm an American first. I don't play the divide-and-conquer game of the parties. I believe in freedom and personal responsibility — pretty much the stuff our founders stood for that seems to have been lost in the mire in the last century especially. That's just where I stand; let's put it that way.'"